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Is The Bond Market Screaming About Trump’s War?

The biggest market on Earth just flashed a warning light. The ten year Treasury yield jumped Thursday to 4.71 percent, the highest since January of last year. Before Trump’s war with Iran started in late February, that yield sat below four percent. Brent crude surged seven percent Thursday and touched one hundred dollars a barrel. The thirty year Treasury hit five point one eight percent, the highest since two thousand seven, right before the crash. Traders now put better than one in three odds on the Federal Reserve raising rates next week under its new chairman, Kevin Warsh. One strategist put it bluntly. “Yields aren’t going down unless oil does.” That 30 trillion dollar bond market sets the price of your mortgage, your car loan, and your credit card. 30 year mortgages just hit closer to secen percent. Wall Street bets on war. You pay the bill

Why Is Trump Holding Disaster Money Hostage?

Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration Thursday in federal court in Rhode Island. Homeland Security announced on July 10th that it’ll hold back 20 percent of the grants states use to guard against terrorism and cyberattacks, unless those states rewrite their election rules first. They’d have to switch to paper ballots, hand audit at least five percent of them, and run every voter through a Homeland Security database. States were allocated more than 740 million dollars this year, so at least 148 million gets frozen. The complaint says it plainly. “Congress never gave DHS or FEMA authority to rewrite state election law.” The Constitution hands elections to the states, not the president. So Trump’s starving them of the money that keeps their people safe until they hand him the keys.

Nearly 150,000 Californians Just Lost Their Vote

New state data shows 148,000 mail ballots got thrown out in California’s June primary, a rate of 1.73 percent. That’s up sharply from two years ago. The biggest reason by far was lateness, more than 93,000 ballots. Another 44,000 died over signatures that didn’t match the county’s records, and 8,000 more showed up with no signature at all. Tulare County in the Central Valley posted the worst rate in the state. Experts suspect the Postal Service, because postmarks now get stamped at processing centers that keep getting consolidated farther away. One researcher said the spike “does really demand the question why this is happening.” Meanwhile Trump’s Justice Department is investigating Los Angeles County for slow counting. Actual mail fraud runs four cases per 10 million ballots. The real threat to your vote is a gutted post office.

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Is Forced Labor Really Why Trump Wants New Tariffs?

The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s emergency tariffs back in February, so he went shopping for a new excuse. He found one. Yesterday his trade office slapped tariffs on 60 trading partners, 10% on 22 of them and 12.5% on the rest, and declared it’s all about stopping goods made with forced labor. The legal average rate is 3.5%. The Progressive Policy Institute figures the bill lands on Americans at 100 billion dollars a year. Congressman Richard Neal wasn’t buying it. “Today’s forced labor justification is too convenient to be taken seriously.” Brazil, hit with 12.5%, is heading to the World Trade Organization. Forced labor is real and ugly. Using it as a fig leaf for a national sales tax on working families is uglier.

Healthcare: Why Do We Pay The Most And Get The Least?

Progressive Democrats held a shadow hearing on Medicare for All Wednesday, led by Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingell, because the majority won’t hold a real one. Doctor Diljeet Singh, who heads Physicians for a National Health Program, told them at least “35 cents of every healthcare dollar is wasted on insurance administration.” Not on care. On paperwork and profit. We spend twice what other rich countries spend per person, and 28 million of us still have no coverage at all. A Yale study found single payer would save about 68,000 lives a year and 450 billion dollars. More than half of House Democrats have signed on. Republicans went the other way, cutting Medicaid and letting insurance subsidies expire. We found 37 billion for the Iran war in five months. The money’s always there when somebody powerful wants it. The question is who gets it

Americans Are Falling Out Of Love With Capitalism

Trump’s whole midterm plan is calling Democrats socialists. Somebody should show him the polling. Fox News finds views of capitalism have collapsed from 30 points positive in 2019 to four points today. Among Republicans, strong support fell from 54% to 41%. Forty-two percent of them now say the economy is “rigged” for the rich, up from 39%. A Wall Street Journal survey found fewer than half of Americans think capitalism is working, down from 60% a decade ago, and only 35% still believe that working harder gets you ahead. Three-quarters say billionaires and big corporations own Washington. That’s not a marketing problem. That’s tens of millions of people looking at 40 years of Reaganomics and finally naming it out loud.

And that’s the way it is, Today Friday, July 24, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Who Pays When Oil Blows Past $100 A Barrel?

Oil crossed $100 a barrel Thursday for the first time since May, and stock markets tumbled right along with it. Brent crude hit about $100.60, up roughly 29% in a single month. Here’s why. Yemen’s Houthi militia says it struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea with missiles and drones, setting one of them on fire. They’ve declared a blockade of Saudi ports. That comes on top of Iran shutting the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil used to move in peacetime. Five Saudi tankers have already turned around. The United States just finished its 12th straight night of airstrikes inside Iran, and Trump is threatening “major military punishment” if the Houthis keep firing. Goldman Sachs says Brent could reach $120 by the fourth quarter. Now think about who eats that. Not the oil traders, who are having a spectacular month. It’s the guy driving 40 miles to a warehouse job, and the woman deciding between filling the tank and filling the fridge. War gets sold to working people as patriotism. It always shows up at their door as a bill.

Is Trump Dismantling Medicaid Piece By Piece?

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services just dropped the third in a series of new rules, and together they add up to the deepest cuts Medicaid has seen in its 60-year history. The newest one goes after how states raise money to pay for care. States like North Carolina and Idaho have been plugging Medicaid holes with insurance premium taxes. This rule slams that door shut. CMS itself estimates the change strips $198.7 billion out of state Medicaid funding over 10 years. Add the new work reporting requirements and a proposed rule slashing provider payments, and Anthony Wright of Families USA calls it “a coordinated dismantling of the Medicaid program.” States get squeezed from both ends. They lose the revenue, and they’re forced to spend new money building paperwork systems, some as much as $30 million apiece, to kick people off. Medicaid turns 61 next Thursday. This is the birthday present. Fewer people covered, providers paid less, and public dollars shoveled into red tape instead of care. That isn’t reform. That’s demolition with a press release attached.

Did Susan Collins Hand ICE A Blank Check?

Maine Democrats have found their issue, and it’s wearing a badge. An ICE agent shot and killed 26-year-old Colombian immigrant Sebastián Durán Guerrero outside his home in Biddeford after agents boxed in his vehicle. His three-year-old daughter was seen crying afterward. Susan Collins chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. She cast the deciding vote on $70 billion in new ICE money. “Susan Collins is directly responsible for handing ICE a blank check,” said Devon Murphy-Anderson of the Maine Democratic Party. Collins did ask Homeland Security to pause non-urgent vehicle stops. Trump overruled her the next morning on Truth Social. That’s the whole story of Susan Collins in a single news cycle. She votes for the money, then sends a strongly worded request, then gets ignored. Trump’s ICE forces have now shot around two dozen people and killed six. A new poll has challenger Troy Jackson leading her 49 to 46, which in Maine counts as a dead heat. Independence you can’t cash isn’t independence. It’s a costume.

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Trump Just Gutted The Endangered Species Act - Nature is losing to naked capitalism and Trumpism...

Here’s something worth sitting with. According to Jane Davenport on Commondreams, you don’t have to fire a shot to wipe out a species. You only have to bulldoze the place it lives. For 50 years the Endangered Species Act understood that. The word “harm” in the law covered destroying habitat, and the Supreme Court upheld that reading in 1995. On July 10th the Trump administration erased it. Harm now means only killing or injuring an animal directly. Log the forest, drill the wetland, mine the hillside, and as long as you don’t shoot the owl on your way out, you’re clean. Habitat loss is the number one driver of extinction on this planet. Aaron Weiss of the Center for Western Priorities calls it “a gift to the oil barons and foreign mining companies.” Writing today, Jane Davenport of Defenders of Wildlife says we’re closer than we think to losing our wild neighbors, and she’s right. The bald eagle, the American alligator, the California condor, the humpback whale, every one of them came back because Americans decided some things simply aren’t for sale. That law has kept 99% of listed species from going extinct. It took this country 50 years to build that consensus and one Friday afternoon rule change to auction it off. The lawsuits are already filed. Extinction, though, doesn’t have an appeals process.

Where On Earth Is Mitch McConnell? Is he alive?

The 84-year-old senator from Kentucky hasn’t been seen in public for weeks and hasn’t cast a single roll call vote since June 11th. His office put out a photo of him in a hospital bed and a statement blaming a fall and mild pneumonia. Nobody has been able to independently verify any of it. His staff won’t answer questions. Majority Leader John Thune couldn’t say for sure when he last spoke with him. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear says he’s received two calls from separate agencies suggesting McConnell had died. “Let’s end the crazy speculation. Just tell us what’s going on,” Beshear posted. Here’s the part that actually matters. Under Kentucky’s 2024 law a special election requires 63 days notice, and election lawyers point to August 3rd as the practical cutoff. Step down after that date, and his people can run out the clock and fold the seat into November on their own terms. So this may not be a medical mystery at all. It may be a calendar.

Geeky Science Alert. Earning More Than Mom And Dad And Still Renting as Owning is Unaffordable.

Neighbors Bank surveyed 1,011 middle-income renters, people pulling down between $40,000 and $125,000 a year. 44% said they now make more than their parents did at the same age and still can’t afford the same life. 57% agreed with a single blunt sentence. “The dream of homeownership feels out of reach for people like me.” 60% said the mortgage industry simply isn’t built for buyers at their income level. Nearly 1 in 4 have stopped saving for a down payment or never started at all. Then comes the twist. 84% overestimated what a down payment actually requires, and 94% had no idea some loans go as low as 3% to 3.5% down. They guessed you need $88,000 in income. They average $63,000. So part of that wall is real and part of it is rumor. Worth noting who paid for the survey, though. A mortgage lender that sells those very loans. The rumor is fixable with a phone call. The prices are not. When a whole generation out-earns its parents and still can’t buy a house, that isn’t a personal failure. That’s a rigged market.

And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, July 23, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Who’s Paying For Trump’s Iran War?

The House just handed the Pentagon one point one five trillion dollars. That’s the biggest military authorization in American history, up from nine hundred billion last year, and it squeaked through two hundred sixteen to two hundred twelve. Seven Republicans voted no. Six Democrats voted yes. Then Republicans passed a budget blueprint opening the door to seventy three billion more, most of it for a war in Iran that Trump started without ever asking Congress. Pete Hegseth told senators the war’s already cost thirty seven and a half billion dollars. Meanwhile two thirds of Americans now say groceries are unaffordable, up from forty five percent before the bombs started falling. Congressman Jerry Nadler called it “a costly, bad bill that funds an illegal war.” When the money always finds its way to the war and never to your kitchen table, that’s not a budgeting problem. That’s a democracy problem.

Why Are We Selling Saudi Arabia the Very Thing We’re Bombing Iran Over?

Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed a nuclear cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia on Wednesday that puts the kingdom on a path to enriching its own uranium. Read that again. We’re at war with Iran, and the stated reason is stopping Tehran from enriching uranium at home. Now we’re handing that same capability to a monarchy whose crown prince has said flat out he’ll build a bomb if Iran gets one. The deal skips conventional international inspections, so Trump had to sign a national security waiver to push it through. Senator Ed Markey warned it risks “igniting an arms race in the region.” The United Arab Emirates took American reactors and gave up enrichment. That was supposed to be the gold standard. Congress has ninety days to stop this one. Ask your senator what they intend to do with them.

Who’s Guarding the Voting Machines Now?

Trump went on primetime television on July sixteenth and said America must take urgent action to protect our voting systems from foreign attack. Here’s the thing. He’s the one who tore that protection apart. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, created during his own first term, has lost roughly a third of its workforce. Staffing dropped from about thirty four hundred to twenty five hundred. The election security advisers who worked hand in hand with state officials were cut loose. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force was dissolved on Pam Bondi’s first day in office. The Foreign Malign Influence Center is gone too. Election officials in both parties say they’re scrambling to plug the holes before the midterms. Remember, Trump fired the last CISA director for saying the twenty twenty election was the most secure in American history. Now he wants credit for worrying about it.

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Why Are ICE Officers Saying Morale Is Worse Than Under Biden?

This story broke in the Washington Examiner, a conservative outlet, so nobody gets to call it a hit piece. Current officers and retired ICE officials say morale has fallen lower than it was under Joe Biden. One officer who voted for Trump called the whole operation disorganized and chaotic. New recruits are getting pushed onto the streets before their background checks clear, while experienced officers get shielded from making arrests. About six thousand officers are working enforcement right now, with ten thousand more in training. Time off gets denied. Days off get canceled. One Texas office doesn’t even have a bathroom, so agents walk past protesters to find one. Officers called the agency “a powder keg ready to blow.” Two men have already been shot dead by immigration officers in Texas and Maine. Chaos at the top always lands hardest on somebody else’s family.

Is a Stock Trading Ban Really a Voter Suppression Bill?

The House passed what Republicans are calling a congressional stock trading ban, two hundred thirty two to one hundred ninety eight, with thirteen Democrats joining every Republican. Except it doesn’t ban owning stocks. It only blocks new purchases, and the penalty is two thousand dollars or ten percent of the trade. Not one member of Congress has ever been prosecuted under the existing law. Then Speaker Mike Johnson stapled voter identification requirements onto it, the same restrictions that have stalled out in the Senate. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal called it “a fake stock trading ban.” A real one is sitting right there, the bipartisan Restore Trust in Congress Act, which would force members to sell off their individual stocks within one hundred eighty days. Republicans won’t bring it to the floor. They’d rather have the press release and the voter ID than the reform.

Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage

Susan Baur is eighty six years old and she runs a diving crew. Back in twenty seventeen she got tired of finding beer cans in the Cape Cod ponds where she swims, so she grabbed two swimmers and a kayaker and told them to start cleaning. They named themselves Old Ladies Against Underwater Garbage. Today several dozen women between sixty five and eighty five clean around twenty ponds a year, and they’ve hauled up at least six thousand pounds of trash. Car batteries. Spent fireworks leaking perchlorates. An eighty pound toilet. The back end of a Corvette. Every diver has to swim half a mile in under thirty minutes to qualify. Member Maggie Megaw said “This is so tangible and immediate.” No committee, no federal grant, just old ladies in wetsuits doing the work nobody in power bothered to do.

And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, July twenty third, twenty twenty six. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Why Should You Pay Five Thousand Dollars More For Bombs?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth marched up to Capitol Hill this week and demanded one and a half trillion dollars for the Pentagon. That’s the biggest military budget in American history, even adjusting for inflation, and it’s more than a fifty percent jump over what we spent last year. Economist Dean Baker did the math, and the extra spending works out to nearly five thousand dollars per household. Baker pointed out we did just fine on eight hundred and sixty billion dollars, more than China, Russia, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom spend combined. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand looked Hegseth in the eye and said, “You’re asking for unlimited money for bombs when people can’t feed their families.” Nearly sixty percent of Americans say the Pentagon budget’s already too big. Senator Ed Markey is pushing a bill to cap defense spending at seven hundred and fifty billion dollars. And tucked inside Hegseth’s request is a forty-six billion dollar fund for artificial intelligence that would pour your tax money straight into private companies. Which companies? He won’t say. So who is this really for? It’s not for you. It’s for the war profiteers who cash the checks.

Is Trump About To Bomb An Eighth Country?

The Trump administration is now weighing military strikes inside Mali, a country in West Africa, going after an al-Qaeda affiliate called JNIM. If the President signs off, Mali becomes the eighth nation he’s ordered strikes on since his second term began. Eight countries. Iran, Venezuela, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria, Ecuador, and now maybe Mali. This one’s reportedly being pushed by Sebastian Gorka, one of the administration’s hardliners. Remember when Trump ran as the anti-war candidate, the man who promised “no new wars”? Just this month, a drone strike hit near Mali’s border with Algeria. And this push into Africa isn’t only about chasing terrorists. It’s also about critical minerals and beating back Russian and Chinese influence across the continent. Now he’s bombing his way across the map, one country at a time, with no vote in Congress and no plan for what comes next. That’s not strength. That’s a President treating the whole world as target practice while working Americans foot the bill.

Why Are One Hundred And Five Million Americans Not Working?

Here’s a number that ought to stop you cold. One hundred and five point eight million Americans are now out of the labor force. That means they’re neither working nor looking for work, and it’s an all-time record. In June alone, eight hundred and thirty-two thousand people dropped out. We’re now two point two million above the worst of the COVID shutdown, and worse than the Great Recession. At the start of this century, only sixty-eight point seven million Americans sat on the sidelines. Now nearly thirty-nine percent of adults are outside the workforce, the most since the nineteen-seventies. Since January alone, two and a half million Americans have walked away from work entirely. Labor force participation has sunk to sixty-one and a half percent, the lowest in fifty years outside the pandemic. Economists point to what they call a “demographic cliff,” as the baby boomers retire in droves. But the four point two percent unemployment rate you hear on the news looks low only because so many folks have simply given up. When people stop believing there’s a job worth chasing, that’s not a healthy economy. That’s a warning.

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AOC And A Republican Sound The Alarm On An Israel Merger

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is warning that a provision buried in this year’s defense bill would merge parts of the American military with the Israeli military. She’s calling it an existential threat to American sovereignty. And she’s not alone. Republican Thomas Massie is standing right beside her against it. The provision goes by a friendly name, the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, but foreign policy analyst Ben Freeman says it would tie our two militaries together tighter than we’re bound to any other nation on earth, and hand Israel enormous sway over American politics. Israel already runs weapons co-production plants in Mississippi and Arkansas. Analysts warn this deal could be permanent, locking America into a partnership no future Congress could easily undo, and handing a foreign government a bigger foothold in our defense industry than any ally has ever had. Ocasio-Cortez put it plainly. “Every member of Congress must vote NO,” she said. The House votes today. Ask yourself who benefits when American sovereignty gets quietly signed away inside a spending bill nobody reads.

Are We Ready For The Next Outbreak?

While measles, hantavirus, and a nasty parasite called cyclospora spread across the country, the people who fight those outbreaks are getting laid off. Former CDC officials are sounding the alarm. Thirteen hundred workers got termination notices, and while some were called back, hundreds stayed gone. Doctor Joel Barratt ran the federal lab that tracks parasites. He watched his eleven-person team shrink to three, then quit. Now the cyclospora outbreak has sickened thousands across more than thirty states, with twenty-six hundred cases in Michigan alone, and the response is crawling. Former CDC official Debra Houry warned bluntly, “The nation is in trouble.” Another former official, Demetre Daskalakis, says the downsizing leaves us unprepared for daily public health, let alone a real emergency. The administration blames the government shutdown and calls the old CDC a bloated bureaucracy. And to be fair, some experts caution that this particular outbreak can’t be pinned entirely on the cuts. But here’s the truth. Germs don’t care about politics. When you gut the people who keep watch, you find out the hard way, and so do your kids.

ICE Keeps Crying Vehicle Attack, And The Cases Keep Collapsing

Over and over, ICE and Homeland Security have justified arrests and even deadly shootings by claiming immigrants “weaponized” their cars against agents. A Guardian investigation looked at twenty-six cases the government promoted as proof of a vehicle attack surge. Guess what they found. Only one ended in an assault conviction. Fifteen people were never even charged. Of the eleven who were, eight saw their charges dismissed. And the government kept pushing these stories to the press long after they fell apart. This all comes right after ICE officers shot and killed two men, Lorenzo Salgado in Texas and Joan Duran in Maine, during traffic stops the agency defended the very same way. A federal judge who reviewed similar claims in Chicago called them “difficult, if not impossible, to believe,” noting agents appeared to brake-check drivers to manufacture crashes. A leaked Homeland Security memo even warned its own agents to stop stepping in front of moving cars. Yet the agency still insists assaults on its officers have jumped more than a thousand percent. But when nearly every case collapses, you have to wonder whether the danger is real, or manufactured to justify the crackdown.

And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, July twenty-second, twenty twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Will Trump End His War To Save His Party?

President Trump is now thinking about pulling the plug on his war with Iran, and not because it’s the right thing to do. According to The Atlantic, he’s weighing a clean break to stop gas prices from climbing and to keep his party from getting wiped out in the midterms. The war’s already cost us thirty-seven and a half billion dollars, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate, and now the Pentagon wants sixty-seven billion more. Eighteen American troops are dead and roughly four hundred and thirty are wounded. The ceasefire collapsed weeks ago, and now both sides trade strikes every single day. Congress still hasn’t gotten a classified briefing on the latest round. But sitting in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters, “We’re not finished at all.” So the killing goes on, the bill keeps growing, and the calendar decides when it stops.

Is The Whole Economy Riding On One Giant Bubble?

Here’s something that should scare you. The value of America’s AI companies has jumped twenty-seven trillion dollars in just three years. That’s thirty-six percent of the entire stock market, riding on a technology that barely turns a profit. Writing in The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey lays out how tech giants are borrowing billions and pouring cash into startups with no path to making money, while the same handful of companies sell to each other and call it growth. Goldman Sachs says justifying these numbers takes what it calls “Panglossian optimism.” Even Sam Altman admits we’re in a bubble. And the International Monetary Fund is warning what happens when it pops. Tighter credit. Less spending. Lost jobs. When Wall Street’s casino finally busts, it won’t be the billionaires cleaning out their savings. It’ll be you.

Why Do Americans Fear Politics More Than Anyone On Earth?

A brand new global survey just found something no other country can match. One in ten Americans now say politics is the single biggest threat to their personal safety. That’s ten times the global average across one hundred and forty countries. We’re the only nation on the planet where more people fear politics than fear their own health problems. “The U.S. figure of ten percent is unprecedented,” said a senior researcher at Gallup, which helped run the poll. Think about what that means. Three assassination attempts on Trump. The killing of Charlie Kirk. Death threats against election workers. The insurrection at the Capitol on January sixth. The only country that even comes close is Hungary. This is what years of stoking rage and division have done to us. We’re now afraid of each other, and that’s exactly how the powerful like it.

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Republicans Hide Voter Suppression Inside A Stock Trading Ban

Watch closely, because this one’s a shell game. There was a real bipartisan bill to finally ban members of Congress from trading stocks on inside information. Then House Republicans quietly stuffed it with voter suppression, adding SAVE Act-style rules to force photo ID at the polls and gut mail-in voting. “Republicans are trying to pull a trick this week,” said Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’s voting no. And here’s the kicker. The trading ban itself is toothless. It only stops new trades and lets lawmakers keep every share they already own. The chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Yvette Clarke, says Republicans just aren’t serious about a real ban. So they protect their own stock portfolios

Did A Judge Just Stop ICE From Deporting Its Own Witnesses?

A federal judge in Texas just slammed the brakes on something ugly. ICE agents rammed a van and shot the driver, a Mexican immigrant named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, dead. The agents weren’t wearing body cameras. Three passengers survived and told a very different story than the government did. So ICE tried to rush those witnesses out of the country before they could talk. Judge Keith Ellison said no, and ordered one of them kept right here in Texas. “When Lorenzo stopped the van, the officer shot him anyway,” one witness wrote. That same week, ICE killed a Colombian immigrant up in Maine. In both cases, Homeland Security claimed its agents were only defending themselves. When a government tries to deport the people who watched it kill, that’s not law enforcement. That’s a cover-up.

RFK Junior Says Explosive Diarrhea Is Under Control

And finally, a story you’ll want to hear before your next salad. A parasite called cyclospora is tearing through the country, causing what doctors politely call explosive diarrhea. More than sixteen hundred confirmed cases across dozens of states, ninety-four people hospitalized, and Texas alone added thirty new cases in a single week. The FDA traced it to contaminated lettuce from a supplier called Taylor Farms, some of it served up at Taco Bell. And Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Junior says the whole thing is, quote, “under control.” Never mind that the cases keep rising, or that his own department made tracking this parasite optional last year. Senator Jon Ossoff says the administration is undermining food safety. So be careful about your greens, folks. Because the man in charge of your food is busy declaring victory over your bathroom.

And that’s the way it is. Today Wednesday, July twenty-second, twenty twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Trump Trapped In His Own Iran Quagmire?

Three American service members are dead this morning. Two soldiers killed when Iran struck a U.S. base in Jordan over the weekend, and a third killed in northern Iraq while handling the wreckage of a downed Iranian drone. One of the dead was a private just nineteen years old. And now the president who promised a fast, clean win is stuck with no good way out. Trump vows Iran will pay many times over, and Central Command has already launched a fresh round of strikes. But the war is unpopular, it’s brutally expensive, and gas is back up to four dollars a gallon. One person close to the White House said it plain. “This is what a quagmire looks like.” A ceasefire signed just last month is now in tatters, and Democratic leaders are demanding an end to what they call a reckless and costly war of choice. Republicans are terrified too, because a souring war drags down the party in power right as the midterms arrive. Working families didn’t ask for this war. They never do. But they’re always the ones who pay for it, in blood on foreign soil and in dollars at the pump.

Can We Share What’s Left Before The Rich Say No?

Now here’s a big idea worth chewing on. Thomas Piketty and forty-five researchers at the World Inequality Lab just dropped a one hundred thirty-five page blueprint for saving the planet and ending poverty at the very same time. They call it the Global Justice Report, and it aims for equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries. The plan would lift the poorest half of humanity from owning just two percent of the world’s wealth up to thirty percent, while the billionaire class falls from six percent all the way down to almost nothing. Every country converging toward the same decent standard of living by the year twenty one hundred. Piketty calls making the global rich pay for climate and welfare the most obvious form of reparations we need. It’s bold, it’s peaceful, and it’s built on hard math, not wishful thinking. There’s just one catch. The richest one percent will fight it with everything they’ve got. So the real question isn’t whether we can afford to share what’s left. It’s whether we’ll let a handful of billionaires tell us no.

Did RFK Junior Just Weaponize Your Health Care?

Robert Kennedy Junior just froze more than one billion dollars in Medicaid money, and take a look at where it landed. Eight hundred sixty-seven million dollars yanked from California. Two hundred million dollars pulled from Minnesota. Both states run by Democrats. Both states with governors Trump loves to attack. Kennedy says his department used artificial intelligence to sniff out fraud, and until Governors Newsom and Walz hand over paperwork, the money stays locked up. Medicaid chief Mehmet Oz put it bluntly. “If it smells like fraud, we’re not paying for it anymore.” But here’s what ought to worry you. Medicaid is health coverage for low-income and disabled people. In California alone it covers roughly fifteen million residents. And this is the second time these same two Democratic governors have been targeted. Back in the spring, Vice President Vance openly threatened to withhold funding from any state that didn’t fall in line with his new fraud task force. When Washington freezes a billion dollars and somehow only Democratic states get hit, that’s not fraud fighting. That’s using sick and disabled people as political hostages.

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Was Jeffrey Epstein A Foreign Agent In Trump’s Ear?

Congressman Jamie Raskin just opened an investigation into whether Jeffrey Epstein was secretly working for foreign governments. Raskin says recently released documents show Epstein acted on behalf of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Russia, and then cashed in on his long friendship with Trump to sell that access. Raskin wrote that the evidence already reveals “damning indications of Epstein’s activities on behalf of foreign states.” In private emails, Epstein even bragged about speaking with a country’s leader and laying out a strategy plan. He also privately alleged Trump was tangled up in a money laundering scheme with a Russian oligarch centered on Florida real estate. He never once registered as a foreign agent, which happens to be a federal crime. And the Justice Department is still sitting on two and a half million Epstein documents it refuses to release. In a Republican-run House, Raskin’s demands will probably go nowhere fast. But if Democrats win back the majority this fall, those files, and the subpoenas, are coming.

Trump Slaps Canada With Fifty Percent And A Smirk

Trump just hit Canada with a brand new fifty percent tariff on a whole range of goods, set to land in one month, and some of it covers products protected under the free trade deal he signed himself. Prime Minister Mark Carney says it flat out violates that agreement. And Trump’s excuse? Canadian bans on American booze, dairy rules, and quotas on cars. Then he stood in the Oval Office and sneered at an entire nation. “Without us there’s no way they can survive.” Well, Canadians aren’t buying it. Only thirty-five percent of them now call the U.S. a reliable partner, and that’s crashed down from eighty-three percent just a few years back. One Canadian premier shot back that his country could dismantle the U.S. economy if it wanted to. But here’s the thing about a trade war. That tariff is a tax, and it’s American families who pay it, every single time they check out at the register.

Are Right-Wing Honeypots Hunting Federal Workers?

And finally this morning, a story that sounds like a bad spy movie but isn’t. Writer Ossiana Tepfenhart reports that right-wing operatives are now running honeypot dating schemes to get federal workers fired. Here’s how the trap works. A charming stranger matches with you on a dating app, keeps steering the talk toward politics, secretly records you trashing Trump, then hands the tape to a so-called citizen journalist who smears your name and torches your career. Federal workers have already banded together to sue conservative provocateur James O’Keefe over exactly this scheme. NPR investigated it too, and the goal, they found, is simple, to purge the people slowing down Trump’s agenda. And they don’t care whose life gets wrecked doing it. So now dating apps come with a warning label. Watch for hidden cameras, and maybe skip politics on the first date. In Trump’s America, even romance has become a loyalty test.

And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, July twenty-first, two thousand twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Eighty Days In A Cage While Homan Whines About Milk

Salah Sarsour is the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque. He’s a Palestinian American who’s lived in this country for more than thirty years, a legal permanent resident with no criminal record. In March, more than ten ICE agents pulled him over while he was driving and hauled him away. The government called him a foreign policy threat. His lawyers say the real reason was simple. He spoke up for Palestinian rights. Sarsour spent more than eighty days locked up. He has diabetes, and he lost over thirty pounds while his blood sugar got checked just once a month. A federal judge finally ordered him released, ruling he had a substantial First Amendment claim. Sarsour said the treatment brought back memories of an Israeli military jail. “For eighty days, I haven’t been able to step outside and breathe fresh air,” he said. Now compare that to border czar Tom Homan. This week he stood outside the White House and complained that he can’t buy a quart of milk without a security detail. A man loses thirty pounds in a cage for speaking his mind, and the guy running the machine is crying about grocery shopping.

Is The Government Hunting Reporters’ Phone Records Now?

The Trump administration is going after the New York Times, and not just the reporters. The Justice Department subpoenaed the phone records of several Times journalists and even their relatives. We’re talking about the spouses of two reporters and one reporter’s mother. Their crime? They wrote about the new Qatari-gifted Air Force One and reported that the Secret Service warned Trump the plane wasn’t safe enough. Now the government wants to unmask their confidential sources. The Times is fighting back in court, calling the subpoenas abusive and improper. “We are going to court to defend our journalists’ rights to report freely,” the paper’s top lawyer said. Remember, last year Pam Bondi scrapped the rule that protected reporters from exactly this. When the government starts hunting the phone records of a journalist’s mother, that’s not law enforcement. That’s intimidation.

Is Rubio Building The Case To Invade Cuba?

The State Department just dropped a one hundred page report titled Cuba, The Capital of Twenty-First Century Communism. It claims Cuba has spent seven decades infiltrating our government and recruiting American activists. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime champion of regime change, called Cuba the leading sponsor of radical leftism in America. Critics aren’t buying it. Free speech groups call the whole thing McCarthyite. They say it revives Cold War conspiracy theories and even cites the old House Un-American Activities Committee to smear activists as foreign agents. One watchdog said the report is “designed to justify both domestic repression and regime change in Cuba.” So this isn’t really about Cuba. It’s about giving Trump a permission slip, both to crack down on dissent at home and maybe to send in the military abroad.

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Why Did Trump’s Envoy Party With The Tate Brothers?

Andrew and Tristan Tate are sitting in federal detention in Miami. British prosecutors just hit them with fifty-nine charges between them, including rape, human trafficking, and crimes involving images of children. Seven women, offenses spanning years. US Marshals grabbed them on a sealed warrant. But here’s the part that should stop you cold. Just four days before the arrest, Trump’s special envoy Paolo Zampolli threw the brothers a garden party in Washington, near the White House. This is the same Zampolli who admitted on camera he knew Jeffrey Epstein had young girls around him. And the Tates’ own lawyer is bragging that their power to sway the next election is “unmatched.” Here’s the catch. The final call on whether they get extradited belongs to one man, Marco Rubio. Watch what he does.

Your Favorite Brands Are Bankrolling The ICE Machine

Ever wonder who’s paying the politicians who keep handing ICE more power? A new investigation followed the money. More than one hundred forty members of Congress sponsored bills expanding ICE. And the corporate cash flowed right to them. The number one consumer brand backing them was Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which cut five hundred eighty-nine thousand dollars to sixty-three of them. Right behind it, Home Depot, Walmart, Toyota, and Google, all writing big checks. Here’s what stings. Back in Trump’s first term, some of these same companies signed letters defending immigrant kids. This time around, not one of them has said a word against the raids. They found out cruelty is profitable, and they decided to cash in.

Geeky Science Alert. Is Your Bug Spray Breeding Super Mosquitoes?

And finally, a warning from the backyard. Scientists at North Carolina State spent nine years tracking the Asian tiger mosquito, the little monster that spreads dengue and Zika. They tested nearly twenty-seven hundred of them. And they found something spooky. A mutation that lets these bugs shrug off common bug spray showed up in one neighborhood in twenty eighteen and spread across the whole county by twenty twenty-three. The culprit? All of us. When everybody sprays their own yard with no coordination, the weak mosquitoes die and the tough ones survive to breed. So every time you fog your patio, you might be building a stronger bug. The mosquitoes are evolving, and your garden is the gym.

And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, July twenty-first, twenty twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Are the Houthis Sinking the World’s Oil Supply?

Yemen’s Houthi rebels just declared a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia, effective immediately, and they’re threatening to slam shut the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the southern gateway to the Red Sea. Close that chokepoint and you wipe out about seven percent of the world’s oil supply overnight. This lands on top of Iran’s war shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, which has already cut global oil flows by ten percent. The Houthis call it their eye-for-an-eye answer to years of Saudi blockade. Tehran has been hammering oil tankers in the Gulf, killing sailors, and American crude reserves have now fallen to their lowest level in forty years. One observer put it plainly. “The Titanic is now hitting the iceberg.” And back home? Donald Trump promised to cut your electricity bill in half within eighteen months. That deadline hit today. Instead, residential rates are up eighteen percent, roughly twice the rate of inflation. And there’s no relief coming. Utilities just asked regulators for another nine point two billion dollars in rate hikes, up twenty-six percent from a year ago, much of it to power the data centers feeding the AI boom. Another promise made to working people, another one broken while the bills keep climbing.

Did a Judge Just Freeze the Biggest Media Merger Ever?

A federal judge just slammed the brakes on the one hundred ten billion dollar deal between Paramount Skydance and Warner Brothers Discovery. Twelve Democratic attorneys general sued to stop it, and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin agreed they’d raised serious questions about how anticompetitive this thing really is. She froze the merger for fourteen days. Think about what it would build. One company swallowing CBS, CNN, HBO Max, Paramount Plus, and two major film studios. And who’d run it? David Ellison, son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of Trump’s closest allies. Paramount says it needs to get bigger to take on big tech, and it’s already hired a Supreme Court litigator to fight this all the way. California’s Rob Bonta warned the merger means “higher prices, lower quality and less content” for all of us. When a handful of billionaires control what you watch, what you read, and what you hear, that’s not a business deal. That’s a loaded gun pointed at a free press, and it’s a Trump ally holding it.

Will Political Hacks Now Control a Trillion Dollars in Science?

The Trump administration wants to hand political appointees control over more than one trillion dollars in federal grants. It’s a sweeping rewrite of the rules that govern research money, and scientists are reacting with what one group called “complete shock and dismay.” For decades, independent experts decided which research got funded, judging proposals on quality and merit alone. Under this plan, Russell Vought’s budget office lets Trump loyalists screen, approve, and kill grants to match the president’s agenda. They could cancel your cancer study midstream just because they don’t like it. The rule bans diversity funding outright, chokes off work with foreign scientists, and buries researchers in paperwork. It’s aimed to take effect the first of October. Nearly ninety-nine thousand people filed public comments against it. Scientists, local governments, even a Republican senator are fighting back. When politicians get to decide which discoveries live and which ones die, you don’t get better science. You get propaganda wearing a lab coat, and the cures we never find are the real cost.

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Who Decides What’s Killing You in Louisiana?

For years, industry groups in Louisiana waged a quiet war over who gets to measure the poison in the air. Along the state’s industrial corridor, families breathe emissions from hundreds of chemical plants every single day. Researchers from Johns Hopkins drove a mobile lab through the region and found cancer risks that topped federal estimates in fourteen of fifteen spots, some by more than eleven times. Yet Louisiana’s official monitors sit miles from the plants and skip the most dangerous chemicals entirely. One expert called it “a public health emergency waiting to occur.” Year after year, state lawmakers tried to require monitors at the fence line, and year after year the petrochemical lobby killed the bills. As one longtime scientist put it, if you don’t look for it, you won’t find it. Then in twenty twenty-four, the state passed a law fining residents up to a million dollars for sharing their own air data. Louisiana already ranks fourth in the nation for toxic emissions per square mile. Think about that. The pollution is perfectly legal, but telling your neighbors about it can bankrupt you. That’s who the powerful protect, and it sure isn’t you.

Maine Democrats Rally Behind a Logger to Beat Susan Collins

Maine Democrats are lining up fast behind Troy Jackson, a former state Senate president and working logger with deep labor backing. He’s on track to grab the party’s Senate nomination and face Republican Susan Collins this November. Jackson steps in for Graham Platner, the populist favorite who withdrew after a sexual assault allegation surfaced. Jackson locked up more than ninety percent of the delegates so quickly that two of his top rivals simply dropped out. The nominating convention is set for July twenty-fifth in Bangor, with a crowded field that had included Shenna Bellows, Nirav Shah, and Jordan Wood. This race matters enormously. Maine is one of the Democrats’ best shots to flip a Senate seat and take back the majority. Bernie Sanders backed Jackson for governor earlier this year, and the party’s populist wing sees him as a fighter for working families against the billionaire class. After years of Collins wringing her hands and then voting with her party anyway, Mainers may finally get a plain-spoken working-class choice. Folks are watching to see if this one’s for real.

Billionaires Hire Nanny Armies While You Can’t Afford Daycare

And finally. While millions of American parents can’t scrape together the money for a single day of childcare, the ultra-rich are hiring whole teams to raise their kids. Meet the “CEO parents.” One former fintech executive spends two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year on a live-in family assistant, a weekend nanny, a personal chef, and a housekeeper. Want your toddler potty-trained? That’s a consultant for up to four thousand five hundred dollars. Bike-riding lessons run as high as four hundred fifty dollars a session. A full-time travel nanny? A hundred seventy thousand a year. A private governess can top two hundred thousand. One agency got a request to have a nanny hunt down a limited-edition collectible toy and pay whatever it took. Another placed a caregiver for parents doing diaper-free baby-raising, expected to read the infant’s cues and sprint to the toilet. One of these parents calls all of it being “intentional about where I spend my time.” Meanwhile the average working mom is intentional about which bill she skips this month. Same country, two completely different worlds. And you already know which one the whole system was built for.

And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, July 20th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Who Guards the Guards When ICE Investigates Itself?

Federal agents got word this week that the FBI will stop investigating violent confrontations involving ICE. According to The New York Times, the guidance went out to FBI managers on Thursday. Here’s why it matters. When an ICE agent shoots somebody, the FBI has been the one gathering evidence, and that evidence sometimes ends up implicating the agent. Take that away, and the job falls to Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE itself. That’s the fox guarding the hen house. This comes after two people were shot dead by ICE agents in Texas and Maine in just two weeks. Journalist Sam Stein said the change grants “pure impunity for ICE to do horrible things.” The Justice Department and Homeland Security both deny anything changed. But Homeland Security Investigations doesn’t even have the power to look into civil rights violations. When the police investigate themselves, accountability dies.

Are Republicans Running on Nothing But Hate?

Republicans are staring down a brutal midterm forecast, and their plan is fear. One Republican tied to Trump told Axios flat out, “It’s going to be a hate election.” The strategy is simple. Get voters to hate Democrats more than they hate Republicans. Their own pollsters say Trump made things worse by launching the Iran war, spiking gas prices and inflation, instead of talking about people’s wallets. One pollster admitted their research shows people just want the president to make their lives better, and they don’t believe he has. Trump’s approval sits ten points underwater. Democrats could take a seven seat House majority. When a party has nothing to offer working people but somebody to blame, that tells you they’ve run out of ideas and they know it.

Where Did Trump’s Millions Disappear To?

Big Tech paid Donald Trump a fortune to make his lawsuits go away, and now nobody can say where the money went. ABC, Meta, Paramount and X handed over as much as sixty four million dollars, funneled toward Trump’s future presidential library. This week Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, along with Representative Melanie Stansbury, said as much as twenty one million of it is missing or spent with no explanation. The fund that was supposed to hold it got quietly dissolved in Florida. No board members were ever named. Warren said “tens of millions of dollars are unaccounted for.” These settlements looked like shakedowns from the start. Now the shakedown cash has vanished into thin air, and the American people are left holding nothing but questions.

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Did the FDA Just Blow a Nationwide Diarrhea Scare?

For days, Taylor Farms was the villain in one of the biggest food poisoning outbreaks in years. The parasite is called cyclospora, and it causes long lasting, watery, sometimes explosive diarrhea. The outbreak has sickened more than sixteen hundred people across thirty four states, with Michigan alone counting over five thousand cases. On Saturday, the FDA said a lettuce sample from Taylor Farms tested positive. By Sunday night, they took it all back. The agency said the result “should be considered a false positive” and apologized to the company. Taylor Farms had already pulled its lettuce from twenty seven states. So the source of a massive outbreak is now a total mystery again. When the government’s food safety testing whipsaws like this, people lose faith right when they need it most.

Dr. Doom Says Robots Are Coming for Your Paycheck

Nouriel Roubini is the economist who called the 2008 crash before almost anybody. They call him Dr. Doom. Now he says artificial intelligence and robots will replace a huge chunk of the workforce over the next twenty to twenty five years. His answer is universal basic income, a monthly check for everyone whether they work or not. He got there answering a question about Social Security, whose trust fund runs dry by 2032. Raising the retirement age won’t cut it, he says, when the jobs themselves are gone. Speaking on Bloomberg TV, Roubini said “we need some form of universal basic income for everybody.” He figures the winners get taxed to pay for it, or the government takes ownership stakes in the big tech firms getting rich off all this. And get this. He calls that the optimistic version. The question working people should be asking is who owns the robots, because whoever owns them owns the future.

Crazy Alert! Trump Says Diet Soda Kills Cancer Cells

And finally today, straight from the President’s own doctor. Dr. Mehmet Oz, who now runs Medicare and Medicaid, went on Donald Trump Junior’s podcast and shared the president’s medical theory on diet soda. According to Oz, “your dad argues that diet soda is good for him because it kills grass.” The logic goes like this. If pouring diet soda on your lawn kills the grass, then drinking it must kill cancer cells inside your body. Oz even described walking into Air Force One and finding Trump with a Fanta, insisting it was fresh squeezed. Now, diet soda can stress a lawn because of the acid. There is zero evidence it does a thing to cancer. This is the man running the country’s health agenda. Maybe drink some water.

And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, July 20, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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Trump is Laying the Groundwork to Reject the Midterms...

Last night Donald Trump took over primetime television to wage war on your right to vote. Standing in the East Room, he claimed America’s election security “falls catastrophically short,” recycled long debunked conspiracy theories about mail voting and voting machines, and demanded Congress pass his stalled federal elections takeover bill just four months before the midterms. Democracy advocates saw this coming. As one warned before the speech, “Trump is trying to end our democracy.” He’s already purged the Election Assistance Commission, sued to seize private voter data, and pushed to decertify voting machines used across the country. Understand what’s happening here. He knows Republicans are facing a wipeout in November, he’s said himself he could be impeached, and so he’s laying the groundwork to reject any election he loses. That’s not politics. That’s authoritarianism, live on television.

Trump Declassified The Proof That Putin Was Helping Him All Along

And here’s the kicker. In that same speech, Trump told Americans to go read the documents he’d just declassified. Somebody actually did. One of them is a National Intelligence Council assessment from August of 2020, and it says Putin and senior Russian officials personally oversaw a proxy operation to smear Joe Biden with a manufactured Ukraine corruption scandal. “Their aim is to defeat the former Vice President,” the assessment says, and ensure Trump’s victory. For years Trump swore Russia never lifted a finger for him. His own document release just proved that was a lie. He was so eager to sell his stolen election fantasy that he accidentally published the receipts on his own White House website. The man attacking our elections is the one foreign dictators keep trying to install. Let that sink in.

Why Did ABC, NBC, And CNN Refuse To Air Trump’s Speech?

For the first time in memory, ABC, NBC, and CNN all refused to carry a presidential primetime address live on their main channels, shoving it onto streaming platforms instead. CNN’s John King explained it plainly, saying this president has “a history of misleading, and in some cases, simply false statements” about elections. Trump had spent days pressuring the networks to air it, and afterward he exploded, demanding ABC and NBC lose their broadcast licenses. Think about that. The president of the United States threatening to destroy news organizations because they wouldn’t hand him a megaphone for his lies. The networks took a real risk with a vindictive FCC breathing down their necks, and they did it anyway. When a president has to threaten television stations into carrying his propaganda, that tells you everything.

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Fired For Refusing To Break The Law At Trump’s Treasury

Assistant Treasury Secretary Kenneth Kies is out of a job. His offense? According to the Wall Street Journal, Kies warned White House officials that what they wanted would “violate Section 7217 of the Internal Revenue Code.” That’s the law making it a crime for the president or his staff to order the IRS to audit, or stop auditing, any particular taxpayer. Kies, who also served as acting IRS chief counsel, clashed with the White House behind closed doors and now he’s being shown the door. Remember, this is the same president who sued the IRS for ten billion dollars and tried to trade the lawsuit for a fund paying off his political allies. Nixon was nearly impeached for trying to weaponize the IRS. Trump’s doing it in the open, and firing anyone who says no.

Who Did ICE Hand A Gun And A Badge To - Who Then Killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero?

On Monday, an ICE agent shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a twenty five year old Colombian immigrant, during a traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine. His father says he was here legally. No footage confirms the government’s story, because agents weren’t wearing body cameras. Now the Associated Press has identified the shooter as thirty seven year old David Brouillette, and his record is horrifying. Ex-wives describe decades of violence, stalking, and abuse, including throwing boiling water at his wife while she held their child. In a voicemail he told her and her relatives, “you should have your f-ing throats cut.” A relative said Afghanistan “trained him to be a killing monster.” ICE hired him anyway in late 2025, and Homeland Security is still defending him. This is who’s patrolling American streets with federal guns and total impunity.

Trump’s Border Czar Threatens America With More Bloodshed

And how did the White House respond to two ICE killings in a single week? Border czar Tom Homan went on Fox News and threatened the country. He blamed Democrats for the deaths his own agents caused, then warned “there will still be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth” and let ICE operate without criticism. Read that again. A senior White House official telling elected members of Congress that if they don’t stop demanding investigations, body cameras, and basic accountability, more people will die. That’s not law enforcement. That’s the language of a protection racket. In America, criticizing the government is the whole point of the First Amendment. When officials start treating dissent as a cause of death, we’ve crossed into territory this country was founded to escape.

And that’s the way it is, Today Friday, July 17, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.

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